CULTURE
Story Developing FILMX IS GETTING PHYSICAL WITH KC By Chase Castor In an age of TikTok and instant dopamine hits, creating and savoring honest art takes practice. There has been a clear resurgence of analog appreciation when it comes to music and vinyl records, but what about visual art? Film photography offers an authenticity that is unmatched by the digital world. Creators are starting to band together to re-introduce the lost art form of film development to the community and make it more accessible for everyone involved. Our photographer Chase Castor sat down with our other photographer Travis Young to talk about…photography. The Pitch: What’s your history with photography, and how did film and its extended world become part of your work? Travis Young: My dad was a hobbyist photographer, and he put a camera in my hand as a kid for fun. As the years went on, my dad slowly stopped playing with cameras, and I was riding the inverse curve of that fallout. In high school, I would photograph a lot of my friends’ bands and started doing senior and family portraits. Then weddings. I got to college and started working for the University Daily Kansan and learned journalism and sports photography. After traveling around photographing KU Basketball, I did a season with the Kansas City Chiefs’
in-house photography department. I’ve been bouncing around ever since. Film became a huge part of my work after a second attempt on my own life— maybe six or seven years back. I got myself into therapy and realized I spent so much time avoiding my thoughts, emotions, and trauma. I had no verbiage or awareness between my body and my brain. I was trying
to connect ideas to emotions and sync everything up.
For those curious about film photography, what’s so special about it? Why go through the extra trouble if everyone has a decent camera on their phone? I think about this constantly. As tech
“Film images are not promised, and any sort of return feels really good, even when the images are bad.” 28
THE PITCH | June 2022 | THEPITCHKC.COM
Travis Young at work in the FilmX lab. Photos by Chase Castor
gets better, cameras get exponentially better. The ability for any single person to make a technically correct image gets easier and easier. We start to expect more from cameras and are quick to absolutely destroy images. There’s way less tolerance for images that are too dark, too blown out, out of focus, etc. I think we have less excuses to make bad photos, so we’re quick to call images bad because the gear is so good. Like, “Yo, this shouldn’t be dark or out of focus— this camera is dope. I spent a lot of money for this to not happen.” Then you have film cameras, which stopped improving in the ’90s. The images we get back are often underexposed, blurry, out of focus—and somehow, these awful photos are the most amazing things ever. It’s always super fun to get these images back. I think there’s magic that happens when making images becomes a gamble. Film images are not promised, and any sort of return feels really good, even when the images are bad.
Is it harder to shoot film? Absolutely not. Disposable cameras exist for a reason. My parents and all their homies used film back in the day. I think the difficulty with film comes with whether or not
